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Process management and process planning with a special focus on mobility and ubiquity

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Due to shifting markets, companies need to adapt or even restructure their business processes frequently. This affects both inter- and intraorganizational processes in order to react to - for instance - changing customer needs and offers of competitors by means of own services. In many of those cases the flexible construction and adaption of process models is a bottleneck. With the increase of mobile and ubiquitous processes that are heavily affected by endogenous (such as, e.g., user preferences) and exogenous influences (such as, e.g., environmental factors) and thus by context information, this bottleneck is expected to further intensify.

Most current process modeling approaches seem only partly suitable with regard to this challenge as the modeling has to be performed manually – although supported by modeling tools – by a modeler. The manual modeling is typically complex and costly even with appropriate knowledge, especially when processes are complex (e.g., when considering context-specific influences) and several company departments or companies are involved. Further, modeling and ongoing maintenance often implies high demands for communication and clarification due to different terminologies of the involved persons.

Within the research area of Semantic Business Process Management a higher degree of automation is discussed when analyzing, designing, implementing and controlling business processes. In this context, we envision the (semi-)automated design and adaptation of process models. As this task can be regarded as a kind of planning problem, it is also referred to as the planning of process models, which consist of both individual actions (PA) and basic and advanced control flow patterns. As part of the work – funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) projects SEMPRO and SEMPRO2 and by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project “Automated Planning of Process Models” – we have been and are currently working on an approach called SEMPA (SEMantic-based Planning Approach). Figure 1 illustrates the idea: Based on a semantic description of the process domain (ontology) and a library of specified actions (PA), the planner generates feasible process models (i.e., sequences of actions including necessary control flow patterns such as for example an exclusive choice) that meet a given problem definition (consisting of an initial state and one to many goal states). We speak of a (semi-)automated approach, as the planned process models are considered as proposals that afterwards need to be discussed with the experts and assessed regarding (economic) criteria. We currently use UML activity diagrams as a modeling notation. However, it is planned to support further modeling notations (like eEPC or BPMN) in the near future.

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Within this research field, we further investigate how context-specific events and information (like e.g. changing weather) could be considered within the planning of process models of mobile and ubiquitous processes. This is a new perspective, as existing works consider them typically during the execution of a process. By means of such a consideration during the planning- or design-phase it becomes possible to identify possible context-events and take into account required adaptions to the process model immediately. Thereby we expect that the amount of unsuccessful process terminations und the related impacts are reduced. The combination with approaches for the selection and realization of mobile services and applications (link) clearly illustrates this advantage.

A selection of current publications:


  1. HOMEPAGE UR
  2. Informatics and Data Science

Chair for Information Systems II

Prof. Dr. Bernd Heinrich

 

 

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